


Sculpture

by Ladycat



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: M/M, Pining, Xander in Africa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-12
Updated: 2014-02-12
Packaged: 2018-01-12 03:08:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1181185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladycat/pseuds/Ladycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Xander had grown away from them, burst from his cocoon of rubble, and turned into something none of his friends could ever understand. But they still were his friends, and he loved him as much as they did him, and for that he stayed in the heart of Africa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sculpture

Spike watched. Through several countries he followed, tucked in the shadows and hidden behind throngs of people, pale skin obvious against a see of sun-darkened faces, but he was never spotted. He knew how to ghost along silently, inconspicuous as the shade he'd mimicked the year before—not that it truly mattered. His prey watched the horizons carefully, meticulously noting every detail, aware of every buzzing threat. It was here, where the wild was not meekly tamed and pushed to one side in the name of ‘progress', that the hunter in him escaped. Spike watched, fascinated, as the goofy child was shed like old, broken skin, revealing something sleek and beautiful that prowled the way a jungle-cat did, silent and wary.

But Xander never looked back to see what followed him. Not once.

Spike thought about how to chastize this lapse. He could leap out one day, game-faced snarls echoing as he used blood to reprimand. He could sneak up, appear inside a patch-work tent that only became ‘home' after its occupant was inside, asleep. He even contemplated just falling instep one day, long strides matched as they headed wherever it was that called itself the final destination. Spike had a hundred of these methods, waiting at the edge of his mind as he stood beneath a straw overhang, smoking something that claimed to contain tobacco in it. Each puff resulted in another mushroom of wispy grey smoke that hung before him, hazing the air and making his prey look as dashing as any movie star. There was something graceful about Xander, out here in the middle of nowhere. It screamed the kind of primal power that Spike was used to Angel exuding, a steady confidence that belied the shattered heart within.

The others never saw it. His friends, busy under skies that wept from overflow, knew that something was wrong. It was why they'd sent—begged—him to travel to where the sun was a constant enemy, so painful after months of freedom, with a shoe-string stipend and a muttered spell of direction. But they spoke of wandering attentions and perhaps an unfulfilled need, waiting on the horizon. Something their minds could easily grasp, memories convincing them that it was just distance and disassociation that was the problem. Bring him back and he would be fine. None of them knew how broken the man fifty feet away truly was.

That, after all, was the point.

Spike wasn't sure if they'd see it even if they stood beside him, ghostly eyes watching as little children were teased and treated, their parents effortlessly reassured that this white man offered no harm and none of the condescending handouts each village had learned to hate. There were those that did not trust him, for anything less would have meant something terrifying, but Xander knew how to deal with that as well: bluntly acknowledging the suspicion or vanishing into grassy horizons if the problem was too great to solve with words. He avoided confrontation, for the most part, and that more than anything else would have told his friends that he had finally grown. They'd see maturity where Spike read avoidance, confidence in what Spike knew was truly recklessness.

Xander had grown away from them, burst from his cocoon of rubble, and turned into something none of his friends could ever understand. But they still were his friends, and he loved him as much as they did him, and for that he stayed in the heart of Africa. It was safer for him, here, away from the busy drone of civilization. Here, no one would demand that he find his place or purpose. Xander simply appeared, did whatever work he could for a night's stay in a hovel, a bit of meal around the night fire. Sometimes there was money, and then he would take a room in a hotel, were he in a place large enough to have such a marvel. Mostly, though, he didn't. He just wandered, often forced to forage for his supper, nursing his broken heart and shattered soul, plying all he thought he had to give as he waited.

It was what he waited for, that Spike worried over. This newly strange Xander had none of the black despair that led to suicide, but there was something there that made a hundred years of reading and learning people sit up. Spike swore he could see it, sometimes, when the sun glanced off burnt skin to reflect in shimmering waves. Something dark and heavy, draped around broad shoulders that refused to bow under the weight.

It surprised him, how much he wanted to yank off that twisted mantle, whether to destroy it or take up its burden and make it his own, he didn't know.

Spike didn't have a martyr's complex, precisely. But with Angel's grand goals accomplished—or as much as they can be—the man himself slowly recuperating with a doting son and warily trusting lover to aid him, Spike found himself attracted to the _power_ that surrounded Xander. The very purposeless that drove Xander to wander a forbidding landscape drew Spike like a needle without the witch's spell to guide his feet. Here was someone who _needed_ so badly that the what had vanished, lost in the constant pressure that never yielded. Not even in sleep, Spike standing guard as Xander suffered through nightmares, unmoving and quiet but for his frantically beating heart and the sour stink of fear and hatred.

Sometimes, he dreamt of killing Xander. Other times, he brought Xander back.

After a month of watching, Spike decided he was ready to make his move. Giles' communiques never encouraged him to hurry, but there had been little things that made him wonder if Xander knew there was someone watching. The way he tilted his head sometimes, empty eye turned towards Spike. The way he would pause when making his purchases, obviously thinking over numbers greater than _one_. Spike considered this a good thing. A man must not grow lost, constantly watching behind his own shoulder—but he must look there at least occasionally.

He chose the simplest way. Xander was haggling with a tall, willowy woman whose skin was the black next to the stars, casually dismissive of the busy market all around him. His left side was tilted towards the crowd, a silent warning that Xander was not as easy a mark as his disability proclaimed. It was a subtle thing, really, and highly effective among men who dealt with deprivation daily. Spike chose not to dismiss it, but augment it, appearing on Xander's right side, eyes studying over his shoulder in an easy ‘guard' position.

The cadence of Xander's speech never wavered, though now there were two dead chickens on the slab before him, instead of one, and the woman was eyeing Spike nervously. She could see him for what he was, Spike realized—and backed up a half step, allowing Xander to sidle into the space he'd just vacated. It was as smooth as if they'd choreographed and practiced it for weeks, each covering for the others weaknesses without smothering their strengths, so effectively that the woman's eyes ringed with white and Xander procured a fabulous price for two dead, unplucked chickens.

The rest of the market was the same, Xander's physical bulk and Spike's ethereal strangeness, easy to see among those who were so close to earth's pulse, not disturbing the chattering pandemonium of an open-air market, but tempering it. Their needs and wants were attended to quickly, and never once did they speak to each other. Only the merchants they bought from.

That began a trend Spike felt no need to disrupt. They _did_ speak to each other, curt phrases wavering on rusty voices, but only when necessary. Days could be spent in utter silence, their bodies dancing together the way Spike had once done with Drusilla, and Angel before her. It taught Spike that _he_ had changed, as much as the man that reclined beside him. Their past was littered with moments when only their need for sound, for distraction, kept words hanging in the air. They were the ones who smoothed over—or created—discordance with a fumbling, tumbling babble and laser-sharp accuracy, respectively. Yet now they sat or stood or most especially walked without a word. There was nothing they needed to say.

Yet.

They separated, occasionally. Spike would communicate with the home office, accepting the odd package of funds and politely refusing to go Slayer hunting—they found girls, or problems without direction from above—while Xander allowed his burden to dig in claws and spurs, pushing him in some direction Spike could not anticipate. It would take him days to find Xander again, but he always did. He could almost taste the shape of Xander's burden now, and knew that it had risen up from the remains of Sunnydale the way this man had, different and broken and wrong. For Xander was wrong—why else had he slipped into Spike's bedroll one night and brought both of them off with lips and hard, busy fingers? He enjoyed the sex, craved it for true, but it was a symptom and Spike had long ago decided never to be someone's sodden bandage again.

Xander tasted like midnight rains in a desert's heat, and his body felt sharp and jagged no matter how hard he tried to press himself smooth against Spike's skin. He tasted like a broken, dying thing, full of despair and an emptiness that made Spike want to shriek his rage into the heavens, the way the vultures did as they circled their expiring dinner. He offered his body without thought, not sharing with Spike, nor even taking as Spike was far more used to. He was _giving_ to Spike, offering what he believed Spike needed and that more than anything convinced Spike that their sixth month old relationship, forged in Sahara's heat and tempered with Kenya's rain, had to change. This was _wrong_ , that a boy so full of life and love was beaten down not by the friends who took without realizing or the world that expected so much of him, but by his own twisted mind, convinced by the shadows he still dreamed of even with Spike's body curled around his own.

Two weeks since they'd last spoken, and Spike winced, afraid, even as he opened his mouth to fire the initial volley. "Can't stay silent forever," he croaked. The rich, smooth voice he'd cultivated to make ladies swoon after only a syllable was unrecognizable, rusty and cracked with disuse, now fully a vulture's cry. "S'called living."

Xander didn't respond, but he didn't leave, either, and after all the months traveling beside him, Spike knew that for a victory. They continued walking down a road choked with dust, unable to hold the memory of their footprints for more than a moment, wind and yet more dust obscuring them. Place had become meaningless. They went where the air felt fresh or if one of them got a tug that meant trouble, reluctantly rejoining the battle that always seems to taunt at their heels, laughing at them as they tried to meander free. Maps were used only when they were desperate and with backpacks full of stores, a loaded shotgun and Spike's unloseable skills, they had no need to identify this dry, burnt hilltop from any other.

Three days passed with the same kind of timelessness as all the days before them. Then: "Is that what we're doing?"

A sleepless night spent with nothing between them and the stars, Xander's mouth too hard as it sucked him to completion. Willow supplied him with amulets that protected Spike from the brilliantly cruel sun, yet heat drove them to become nearly nocturnal. To spend the night when it was truly night, velvet skies so spangled that they were never able to feel alone, was unusual and telling. The dark held no enemies, for them. Rather it held memories, images that danced and twinkled above them, inescapable now that the burning pall of sunlight had vanished, taking its constant source of discomfort away with it. Spike knew the horrors that lived in his mind. It was Xander's he wondered over, endlessly plying through different options and variations, unable to determine what Xander saw when his eye traced over Andromeda's gilded crown.

As the sun broke the next morning: "Vampire, pet. We're shadows. Mimics."

It wasn't so much a sally as a direct shot to Xander's gut, and it speared him into unmoving wonder. Barely five minutes went by before Xander was looking at Spike, single eye roving over his body as if this was the first time Xander was truly _seeing_ him. It might have been. Spike had met those in waking trances before, bodies active, minds seeming clear, while _self_ was long past gone. "You don't mimic." There was indignation in the sandpaper grumble, and Spike did not let himself smile when he heard it.

"Yes. I do." Unspoken was that Xander didn't—or shouldn't, as he'd spent over a year perfecting the imitations until they required no thought at all. He was trembling, so lightly that only the shaman in the next village might have noticed, and they found out later that he was too busy defending his people from a horde of demons close to starvation and desperate enough to attack one so strong. When they arrived, Spike and Xander killed the demons in exchange for a few nights protection and minimal comfort. But that would be later, after they finished the first real conversation either had had since arriving in Africa. "I'm dead, Xander."

Saying his name produced a flinch that pulled whitened lips even tighter against Xander's teeth. "So am I."

He walked, and Spike followed like the shadow he truly was and had always been, a position that suited him as living never had. They saw heavy black smoke before they reached the village, unsurprised to see orange licking at the far away sky while impossibly tall people scurried like ants, attempting to control the blaze. They did not bother with the fires, for although Xander was handy at organizing those whose language he did not speak, his years in building useful even among structures that contained not a hint of gird or beam, the fight was what mattered. The village was not their concern—the demons were.

They were vicious, not a female as Spike had privately feared, desperation driving her to protect her young, but instead several males, old and stupid, wanting to relive the glory gangs of Slayers now prevented. Spike enjoyed the fight, the hot rush of blood beating behind his eyes, limbs moving with a freedom normality always seemed to forbid, the cry of creatures who knew that their time was near and that Spike was the one who would deliver their remains to earth. After killing two with effortless ecstacy, Spike turned automatically to check up on Xander—and understood. There was the fury, the quickfire wit that Spike had admired even as he denigrated it, years before. The steadfast loyalty that kept him from fleeing a fight he could not win, stubbornly solid and dependable as few other things were in life. Even now—had his friends truly needed him, he would have gone to them, his own issues forgotten in the face of theirs.

Seeing it made Spike burn. He _wanted_ that, wanted that trust and affection given to him. He wanted _Xander_ , Spike realized even as fingers closed around viscera, yanking. Not the way he had him, frantic, painful encounters that were all about a body's needs. He wanted _all_ of him.

That night, while the villagers chanted their gratitude to the stars, plying them with fresh food and fresher blood, donated from the strongest of the men, collected by approving women who did not see evil in Spike's demands, Spike thought very hard about what to say, and just how broken Xander needed to be before he could be patched up. He was not a patient man—demon—and Spike knew that he would only have one shot at this, regardless.

He didn't know why Xander slipped free of the surprisingly comfortable pallet they were given—to share, something neither objected to. He knew it was spring, Africa at its sweetest and still the nastiest of bitches to walk the earth, but not that it was almost the end of May, June's heated kiss waiting just around the bend. All he knew was that the misery coming from Xander was the strongest ever, and he had what he hoped was the perfect sentence. So he followed the hitching breathes that were never quite sobs, the erratic heartbeat that never quite sped up enough, standing behind him when Xander finally came to rest in the middle of a field.

"Don't," he said, the ache in his voice ripping at Spike's belly, a wounded animal's plea to stop, no, don't kill, mercy.

Vampires had no mercy in them. "Is this what she'd want for you?" he demanded. "Is this why she stayed with you even after, sacrificed for you, so that you could turn into a stone-man, biding his time until he died, too?"

The breaking of Xander's soul was loud enough that Spike's ears recorded the sound, though could not pinpoint the source. "Don't," he said again.

"You don't get to tell me what to do, Alexander Harris. Now sodding well grow up. I want to go home."

The last sentence popped out without his consent, and he winced, certain now that all the work he'd done over the last half year and more of his life would be undone—but Xander did not shatter into too many pieces for even the most meticulous to repair. No, all he did was fold to his knees, sobbing out two years of grief, at the past he had refused to look at, and the present that had destroyed itself in turn.

Spike held him. How could he not? Spike's heart was always given this way, when strength unfurled to bear a core of vulnerability that matched his own, the rhythms mated and harmonized long before this point. He held Xander as he sobbed for hours, until the sky streaked itself in a baby's pink and blue, and the face that lifted to look up at his was young again, for all the stubble made it stone-hewn.

"Where is home?" Xander asked.

"I am home," Spike told him. "I'm your home."

The villagers said nothing when they returned, silent as Xander went to the first ruined hut and examined the tools and supplies they had. When he asked for things, voice wobbly as a day-old chick's, the spell broke: the village boys ran do his bidding, laughter trailing behind them, while the women clucked and fussed at Spike and told him that he must see the Shaman, to work such magic on the Stone Man, whose one remaining eye had been so dead. No longer, though, and Spike watched without helping, for Xander wanted no help as he built and created with his hands, something he had not done since leaving Sunnydale and all it contained behind him. At night, when the villagers slept all around them, they would sneak back to the field that both thought of as theirs and touch each other in ways they had done a hundred, thousand times before—yet were new again, gifts freely given to tease and taste, their laughter as loud as their moans. Their conversations wandered, slow at first, then rising to a torrent that rushed over the rocks of their minds, smoothing them until each had given the other their darkest secrets: Xander, glad that it had not been him, that he was truly free of his relationship with Anya, and the guilt that had nearly killed him for it. Spike, useless without someone to be there for him—not for Spike to depend on, no. But to depend on Spike.

"I am your home," Spike whispered to him every night before they slept. And then later just: "Yours."

They stayed there nearly a month. Buildings already transitory due to elements greater than a demon were easily rebuilt, Xander careful not to improve or modify, only recreate. It was hard labor, but the work removed layers from Xander's shoulders, the dark creature Spike had seen there vanishing into a haze of sawdust and broken greenery, life filling the sucking emptiness. He watched Xander work as often as their rapidly dwindling supply of talismans allowed. Xander was beautiful, then, because while he worked, he always smiled.

Spike had long ago learned to love those smiles. Relearning that now was a joy.

When the last of the talismans had run out, Spike said nothing about Willow's last email, detailing that to make more she would need Spike's physical presence. Neither was certain how true that was, but as hints went, it was of the gentler variety. As different Xander was from the pitted figure he had been, it still came as a shock when Spike returned one evening to find their possessions packed and Xander waiting patiently for him.

Their kisses made Spike's knees weaken, stardust dazzling his eyes, even after a month of receiving them. "Come on," Xander said. Spike followed without question, saying goodbye to the villagers and walking until they finally came to a road. A car waited for them.

"You know how the Shaman was doing those dream-traces with you?" Xander stood behind him, arms sliding around Spike's middle to share warmth that the growing heat made superfluous. If Xander moved, Spike was still going to have to kill him. "Well, I did them too. Figured out how to contact Willow, and she did her bureaucratic nose-wiggle, tossed around some of Giles' money, and got this. A car, that'll take us to an airplane."

Initiative from Xander was a new and delicate thing, even after a month's worth of practicing. Spike could feel the way the other man trembled around him, aching for reassurance. But Spike knew better than to instantly give it. "And where's the airplane take us?"

"England, first. And then ... I was thinking home."

Vampires did not need to breathe. It was something Spike often forgot, but when his chest constricted so much that bones creaked, he could dizzily remind himself that it would pass and he would not pass out. "Right," he said, not bothering to wonder how it sounded outside the echos of his skull. He wanted to pull free from arms he'd previously melted against, but Xander was strong and did not let him. "Xan—"

"You are my home. And I'm yours."

Spike forgot to breathe again, but this time there was no dismay in the force that held him rigid. For creatures such as they, who had burned themselves too much and held memories that scalded still, _I love you_ was not possible. But this was more than enough. "Then?"

"We should find a home together."

The driver was very patient as his passengers disappeared into the scrawny, bushes not five feet away. He even tried not to watch. His employer had mentioned that something like this might occur: _after all_ , the girl whose voice sounded innocent but held a power that no man dared dispute, _why did he think we sent him down there in the first place? Men. Always do everything the hard way._

She'd even given him a few extra coins, to buy a proper pack of cigarettes so the waiting would be easier.


End file.
